Friendz News (August 2019)

A little over a year ago we were closing up our ICO, and soon after, when we started going internationally, we came to face a few major problems affecting our entire business model. To sum it up, the three main issues we found that hindered our international growth were:

- Our approach to business clients: 

Friendz is a B2B company, as such selling our services to other companies - mainly multinational - to whom we represent a marketing tool that helps to reach various business objectives: from brand awareness, to lead generation, to sales. What we realized is that, trying to approach clients with a commercial team in Spain as we do in Italy was extremely difficult and, most of all, not at all scalable. Working in another Country to rebuild the same network of long lasting relationships that we nurtured in Italy, and that allow us to keep selling advertising campaigns, comes with an enormous effort. To think of replicating this same model in every Country and for many clients would be extremely long and expensive, so we turned to automation by building a platform that allows the direct purchase of our services without the support of a local sales team. In other words, we need to develop our own SAAS (Software As A Service) - a platform, website - through which companies can select and purchase our marketing services, just as they already do on Facebook through the Business Manager.

- Limitations of Facebook: Friendz was conceived as a tool that allows companies to involve common people in their marketing strategies using their personal social profiles as a showcase. For this purpose, we built a community that could produce high quality photographic content and be active on Facebook and Instagram according to the companies’ needs. Last year, after the scandal Cambridge Analytica, Facebook began cutting off all add-ons, platforms, apps and services connected with API or any other automatic integration that allowed access to the users’ personal profiles, and our model started to become problematic to manage. Some of the services that were cut off, in fact, were very important for us, since they permitted the automatic publication of contents on the users’ profiles. Thus, our life - and our user experience - became a lot harder. Knowing that, from one day to the other, Facebook could very well jeopardize our business, made us realize the importance of diversification. We have not changed the core of our business, we are still working with digital communities, but we started operating on different channels (not only Facebook and Instagram) in order to protect our business from their strategic decisions.

- The growth of the community: in these past 3 years, Friendz as a community grew up to hundreds of thousands of people organically. In other words, we never actually advertised the app, as it grew naturally through the word of mouth of its users. We then realized that there are now two big groups of people, coexisting within our app, in the same ambient despite having very different needs. A functioning product should always be tailored on its final user. In fact, having to satisfy two different targets meant a continuous adaptation of each feature, thus posing a big restraint to the development. On the one side we have the creative users, that enjoy taking pictures and being challenged. This is the main target of our app. On the other side, we have the people whose main interest is the amount of credits they gain through each action, with the final purpose of saving on their purchases. So we thought it necessary to separate the two targets, in order to allow them to grow in their own proper environment.

- Use of cryptocurrency: on this subject, the big companies - that are our main clients - are still very much behind. They do not fully understand the financial and fiscal implications, and are still doubtful of the advantages. Small and medium companies, on the other hand, are more trusting and more willing to take a risk, mainly because they are generally run with an entrepreneurial vision and are not as structured as multinationals. Being as it is, we thought of speeding up the circulation of FDZ through the introduction of services that could be accessible to smaller companies as well.

To sum it up, we spent the past year analyzing and solving all of the aforementioned issues. We have now overcome almost all of them, and plan on completing this phase in a couple of month.

We are working on our own SAAS, a platform through which companies can directly purchase our services by paying in fiat money or in token, whose use we aim on promoting.

Then, we needed different communities, always active on social networks and whose actions are still remunerated by our clients, but not completely dependent on Facebook. And we need to give a tailored space to our different groups of users.

So, we planned a fork - in the crypto sense of the term - of our app and community. We kept in the target of creative users in the app, turning it in a social game focused on photography and creativity. All our other users, who are more interested in savings, gains, and shopping, we have moved to a new platform, that we called Atlantix.

Atlantix is another version of Friendz, based on the same logics but focused on the final gain of the users. And since we also needed our own SAAS - the platform where clients could directly purchase our services - we thought of melting the two together.

Atlantix is not only the home of our savings-driven community, but also, hosts the business account through which all our clients - big and small - can order and activate all the advertising campaigns that we offer and produce.

Last weeks we launched the first public Beta of the platform, that will help us in overcoming most of our restraints on development and keep moving on internationally.

Evidently our path has not been extremely foreseeable, as most of the issues we discovered along the way and, admittedly, did not communicate in a timely manner as we wanted to be sure both of the problem and of the solutions. Our communication has been confused at times, but our aim of developing internationally has never faltered, which is why we needed to stop and fix all our bugs in advance.

The technical development of Atlantix and of the community will be completed after the summer, between September and November. After that, we will resume our commercial development - in Italy and aborad.

Concerning our work with communities, as I said, we are working with more than one, each vertical on a specific target user: the creative community within the Friendz App, the crypto community within the token booster platform, and the savings community within Atlantix.

Through their business account in Atlantix, companies will be able to activate each of our communities based on their business needs.

For example, if the KPI is brand awareness, they will be able to activate our creative community through Friendz App in order to share branded contents on social networks. If the KPI is lead generation and looking for people who can be potentially interested in a product / service, they will be able to activate the community within Atlantix.

Our SAAS will allow all our clients to publish their own offer, collect leads from interested users and then redirect the conversion on their own e-commerce or website. Or, if the main interest is maximizing sales of a product or service, they will be able to do so directly through Atlantix with no need for further redirection of traffic.

Moreover, through our business manager we will allow our clients to activate any kind of campaign that they might be interested in, both through Atlantix and through Friendz, without the need to pass by our commercial team.

This is what we are doing in order to improve our operations and facilitate the development.

On top of all this, we are working on speeding up token adoption, since we do not believe too much in growth brought by speculation but rather on the effective use of tokens and on real demand, as that is the only thing that will be left when the hype will die down. This is why we don’t care right now about being on a big exchange or planning other activities based on speculation, which we will leave for after we have built the foundation of the system.

First we need to provide a service that our clients can be interested in buying with tokens, making the economy run.

To speed up the process, considering that the higher interest in cryptocurrencies comes from smaller companies - that we had no way to serve until the launch of Atlantix - we developed a BOT that reenacts on exchange what happens when a company buys one of our services. The technology is still raw, we are still working on it, but it works by moving FDZ each time that one of our services is bought: when a company buys our credits, it buys FDZ, when our users change our credits in shopping cards, it sells FDZ.

(Workin in it we are improving the algorithm so you can see sometimes the bot stopped during this beta phase).

At our beginning, the only option our users had was to convert the credits they gained by taking part in branded campaigns in shopping cards. Our long term objective is to open up new possibilities for our users, for them to spend our credits in new features and services through the use of FDZ in our apps. 

Turning Friendz in a creative social game focused on content production and photography, allows us to introduce an infinite series of internal features, a sort of payable upgrades, which are in fact services to our community purchasable with tokens.

The more these services - and the community - grow in number, the less the need to convert the credits in gift cards, thus increasing demand for tokens whereas the offer will stay the same, raising the value in time.

This sums up what we have done in the past year, and our programs for the near future, which have also been summarized in a letter that was sent a month ago. 

Alessandro Cadoni

Friendz Team